8 Answers
8

There are exceptions. @oosterwal, @tcovo, and @wooble give good examples of perfectly valid constructions starting with especially (or in wooble's case, starting with because).

An example with because :

Because of the necessity of
lowering their their baskets to the
cave floor daily, the Pitifoo began to
develop ingenious mechanisms to deploy
the baskets with greater speed and less effort.

An example with especially:

Especially during the depression in
the seventeenth century, when money
was scarce in many countries,
transactions frequently reverted to
payments in kind. The Cambridge economic history of Europe
edited by Sir John Harold Clapham, Eileen Power, Michael Moïssey Postan, Edwin Ernest Rich

It's probably acceptable in email correspondence at work, but you have to be aware of the informal tone it gives.

Sometimes deliberate informality can be a good thing, as it gives or creates the sense of or the illusion of a closer relationship. It is more casual as well as being more informal, and this relaxation of 'formal' rules can give the correspondence the same relaxed feel.

'But wait,' I hear you saying, 'aren't you just deliberately and strategically making a mistake if you use it like that? '

"Especially if you use it like that?" I ask.

'No,' you say, 'you're just mocking me. I mean that it isn't just an ugly cousin of the correct sentence structure, which you can choose to use as you please. It's actually broken. It's a solecism."

"Absolutely not," I insist. "Definitely not." I shake my virtual head. "The machinery of language is far more flexible than you think. The rules are beaten into your noggin so that you know how sentences function. One you know these rules and how they operate, the actual syntactic and semantic mechanisms you use to communicate your thoughts can twist, bend, and stretch to fit the shape of current circumstance."

Among friends, it's fine, as long as one of you isn't a grammar absolutist.

It's certainly an acceptable formation in fiction writing, as it mirrors the actual practice that occurs in spoken English.

Your instincts are on the money. The basic form of the sentence should be:

action/conclusion[,] [especially] if condition.

That said, this is one of those rules that you can break if you do so knowingly. Splitting the sentence in two before "especially" adds extra emphasis (as in @Ed Guiness's answer). As with most stylistic rule-breaking, you should do it sparingly; over-frequent emphasis loses its effect and makes you look like a twit.

The high water-salt ratio will not be good for you. If you are dehydrated.

which is already of debatable grammaticality because, as in the original passage, the second 'sentence' is an isolated subordinate clause, which is not really a sentence. @oosterwal gave an example which uses a full sentence, which sounds less awkward.

Also, don't forget that 'especially' can modify an adjective, in such constructions as:

+1 for using 'especially' to modify an adjective.
–
oosterwalMar 30 '11 at 18:08

1

@orokusaki: Did you perhaps miss the word "not"? Tcovo most likely meant that they're both "not really a sentence" - since that's what's written in the answer :) As for the second example (about trucks) - why do you assert that that's not grammatical?
–
psmearsMar 30 '11 at 20:30

@psmears - Good lord, I must have been tired when I visited this post. My apologies.
–
orokusakiApr 4 '11 at 0:51

I disagree with other posters here – I think the example given is grammatical. It may not be formal or good style, but it is grammatical. The second sentence under consideration (Especially if you are dehydrated.) could merely be This is especially true if you are dehydrated condensed for ease of utterance.

Absolutely. This type of elision tends to occur less in formal writing, but it's by no means absent even there. And it's positively rife in informal (but still grammatically acceptable) speech.
–
FumbleFingersMar 31 '11 at 3:09

I don't think it is fair to say that you disagree with the other posters here, unless it is in something other than the construction being grammatical. I see a few saying that the construction is unacceptable for various reasons, but not one explicit statement that it's ungrammatical.
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jbelacquaMar 31 '11 at 3:12

@jgbelacqua Perhaps it was unfair of me to say this. In my defence, I was going on the answers that were posted at the time (although I may not have seen them all).
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J D OConalMar 31 '11 at 7:53

I think @Tcovo is grammatically correct, but this construction is especially unclear, in part because it is uncommon to see 'especially' at the beginning of a sentence when active as an intensifier on an adjective.
–
DancrumbMar 30 '11 at 19:51

5

Just because something may be ambiguous does not mean it is ungrammatical...
–
psmearsMar 30 '11 at 19:51

@orokusaki: Did I assert that ambiguity had anything to do with correct grammar?
–
psmearsMar 30 '11 at 20:21

@orokusaki, ambiguity (and avoiding it) have a lot to do with correct grammar, but that doesn't mean that any ambiguous phrase is ungrammatical.
–
AmandaMar 30 '11 at 20:28